`LIGHTS` SINCERE, BUT HAS ONLY FLASHES OF SUCCESS

Richard Christiansen, Entertainment editorCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Inept and inadequate as it is for most of its time, the plucky little production of ''Colored Lights'' at Palladium Productions, nonetheless, suggests that real musical drama might one day be made from ''A Streetcar Named Desire.''

To explain: ''Colored Lights,'' written and composed by Christopher Moore, is the musical tale of a romantic triangle formed by an aging Tennessee Williams-type playwright, a soft young composer who wants to musicalize one of the author`s dramas and the aggressive female agent who competes with the boy for the writer`s affections (and contemptuously refers to the gentle composer as ''Miss Melanie'').

Intercut with this romance are scenes from one of the fictitious playwright`s dramas, featuring three characters based on the roles of Blanche Dubois, Stanley Kowalski and Mitch in Williams` ''A Streetcar Named Desire.'' The songs, tentatively performed, are unmemorable, but they are valid enough to indicate that, like Williams` ''Summer and Smoke,'' ''Streetcar'' might one day be turned successfully into a contemporary opera.

Until then, ''Colored Lights'' will have to go down as a brave and resourceful failed effort.

Seating fewer than 40 persons, Palladium`s storefront auditorium is arranged so that audience members have to cross the stage to reach their seats at the rear of the room. Within that highly constricted space, however, director-designer Jeffrey Kelly has deployed minimal but effective lighting effects and a pianist and percussionist hidden behind the setting of the playwright`s Florida Keys home.

Awash in southern accents, the cast is headed by Bruce A. Wallace as the failing playwright, Jamie Newell, in a variety of caftans, as his mothering agent, and Tom Viveiros, with a pleasing voice and stage demeanor, as his young lover.

The script and songs sometimes tip into the ludicrous, especially in a painfully poor satire of Williams from an Off Broadway revue the boy composer has written, but the work as a whole is not entirely laughable.